Republicans Should Shoot Message, Not Messengers

Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Republicans are vowing to learn from
their mistakes in Senate races in 2010 and 2012. Most of them
are convinced that they would have 50 seats, not the 45 this
election left them with, had they run better candidates. Senate
Republicans say they are therefore going to get more involved in
primary campaigns.

In the process, they will find that candidate selection
isn’t easy to fix -- and is the least of their problems.

In 2010, the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, run by
Senator John Cornyn of Texas, was taken by surprise by the Tea
Party surge in the primaries. Cornyn backed losing candidates in
Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida and Pennsylvania. Two of
the politicians he supported ended up leaving the Republican
Party because they had so little support within it.

After those embarrassments, Cornyn and his colleagues
largely stayed out of the primaries this year. Since the
election, however, Republicans in Washington have jumped to the
conclusion that running away from the primaries was an
overreaction that allowed weak candidates to get nominated.

The two races that Republicans think they threw away this
year were in Missouri and Indiana, where their nominees were
sunk by remarks they made about abortion and rape. In neither
case, though, is it clear how increased involvement by
Washington-based Republicans would have changed things.

Party insiders knew from the start that Todd Akin, the
candidate who won the nomination in Missouri, was going to be
trouble -- enough that the Democrats were running ads to boost
him. Republicans also knew that denouncing him would help him
present himself as a threat to the establishment. Akin was in a
three-way primary race so tight that it was hard for those who
feared him to unite behind an alternative and pressure the other
candidate to get out.

Unforeseen Problem

In Indiana, the party establishment preferred Richard
Lugar, the incumbent senator, to Richard Mourdock, who
successfully challenged Lugar in the primary. Nobody, however,
foresaw that Mourdock would self-destruct. Writing on Salon.com
in May, Steve Kornacki contrasted Mourdock with losing Tea Party
candidates from 2010: “Mourdock -- unlike, say, Christine
O’Donnell or Joe Miller -- is an established statewide
politician whose public behavior doesn’t easily conform to the
image of a kook.”

The national publicity that Akin and Mourdock received has
distorted people’s perceptions of the Senate races, creating the
impression that Republican losses resulted from Tea Partyers’
foisting unelectably extreme nominees on the party. Akin was
not, however, the consensus choice of Tea Partyers, who were
split three ways in the primary, just as other Republicans were.

On Election Day, what’s more, other factions of the party
were at least as disappointed as Tea Partyers were. For most of
the year, Republicans expected to pick up seats in Montana and
North Dakota, where wholly establishment candidates were running
for Congress. They lost both races narrowly. Tommy Thompson and
George Allen were not Tea Party favorites, and they lost races
that had been considered winnable in Wisconsin and Virginia,
respectively. Tea Partyers and social conservatives point to
those races and complain, justifiably, that they have become
scapegoats for Republican defeats.

Senate Republicans insist that their efforts aren’t
directed against conservative activists in the party. They say
they will consult with Tea Partyers and others to generate a
consensus about future candidates. The newly elected vice
chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee is
Senator-elect Ted Cruz of Texas, who won conservative trust
during his own insurgent campaign against the party
establishment earlier this year.

New Tactics

Maybe the new tactics will improve the Republicans’ showing
in future elections. Yet it is hard to see how they would have
changed the outcomes in any of the races during 2010 or 2012.
And the defeat of Republican Senate candidates of every type
this year suggests that choosing better candidates is not the
party’s principal problem.

That’s a second way the focus on Akin and Mourdock is
misleading: It makes candidate selection in general look more
important than it is. Better candidates would have made a very
good election night for Republicans in 2010 even better. This
year, unlike 2010, Republicans lost most of the closely
contested Senate races. Choosing the wrong candidates made those
losses slightly worse, but didn’t cause the night to go sour in
the first place.

Republicans have now lost seats in three of the last four
Senate elections. The party’s message isn’t sufficiently
attractive to win a majority of the votes, it appears, absent
highly favorable circumstances. No change in the process of
picking candidates can possibly fix that problem.

(Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior
editor at National Review. The opinions expressed are his own.)

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